Category: Single parent

She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

It’s not my birthday

“How can I be privileged if sometimes I feel sad?”

I saw a feminist cartoon satirizing the conceit of cis white male privilege that said this. Even though I consider myself to be multi-racial, I understand how I read to most. Because of the color of my skin and the understated nature of my epicanthic folds, mentioning the tribulations in life is prohibited, or are disfavored in this time and place. Society commands me:

“Shut up and count your blessings”

that’s generally good advice anyhow.

They are many. My children are healthy and doing well. My fiancee is smart, powerful, beautiful, and loves me. I have my health.

So I won’t complain. Nevertheless, at some point in our lives, getting older is no longer a celebration, it’s a source of bemusement… Until you are so old that it’s a celebration again. Isn’t this sentiment universal? Can’t we all agree that wary melancholy is okay?

No? Shut up? Okay… Lyrics:

Well the rain falls down without my help I’m afraid
And my lawn gets wet though I’ve withheld my consent
When this grey world crumbles like a cake
I’ll be hanging from the hope
That I’ll never see that recipe again
As I walk, I think about a new way to walk
As I think, I’m using up the time left to think
And this train keep rolling off the track
Trying to act like something else
Trying to go where it’s been uninvited
It’s not my birthday
It’s not today
It’s not my birthday, so why do you lunge out at me?
When the word comes down, “Never more will be around”
Though I’ll wish you were there, I was less than we could bear
And I’m not the only dust my mother raised
So, I’m rattling the bars around this drink tank
Discreetly I should pour through the keyhole or evaporate completely
But there’d be no percentage, and there’d be no proof
And the sound upon the roof is only water
And the rain falls down without my help I’m afraid
And my lawn gets wet though I’ve withheld my consent
When this grey world crumbles like a cake
I’ll be hanging from the hope
That I’ll never see that recipe again
It’s not my birthday
It’s not today
It’s not my birthday, so why do you lunge out at me?
When the word comes down, “Never more will be around”
Though I’ll wish you were there, I was less than we could bear
And I’m not the only dust my mother raised
I am not the only dust my mother raised

Kids on bikes

Cyclists in my city often annoy me. An unpopular opinion (I know), but this morning I watched a cavalry of four kids heading either to the local middle school or high school. They were glorious, in a natural formation, standing on the pedals, arms & back arched, school backpack on so that their open windbreaker flap in the breeze. No silly  shoes, no panniers, no wobbly handlebars, rules of the road obeyed like riding is a thrill; Bill Denbrough beats the Devil ….

Adult bikers, you are doing it wrong.

I was standing at the bus stop alone because my High School daughter dashed up the hill and across the street to beat the crosswalk light and catch the bus. She waved to me before boarding, English Muffins in the other hand.

In a previous year, I would have ran with her and before that, I wold have ran past her and made her look both ways before crossing. I still have an instinct to do that, but its clear and everyday clearer still that I must arrest that instinct.

Jesus and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; See also: Raphael Lataster, “Did historical Jesus really exist? The evidence just doesn’t add up.” Washington Post (Dec. 14, 2016)

My daughter interviewed me the other night for a school project about world cultures. She wanted me to talk about the rituals of birth, initiation, marriage, and death. Turns out, I had a lot to say about it. She needed to take the recording and transcribe what I had to say. She seemed nonplussed to have had to transcribe so much stuff.

Thinking about the interview, I got emotional. I brought feeling and emotional investment to what was really just a school project; imbuing the work product with a level of personal detail that maybe will be embarrassing to her.

And yet, I doubt that it will. At this point, these stories are all familiar to her. They are the family lore, like my Mom & Dad’s stories about “the War” were family lore to me. She digested my testimony with nary a reaction; the placid objectivity of an anthropologist in the field.

Family stories passed from parent to child like this, nevertheless, become the property of the recipient. These stories are plastic and malleable, owing less to the truth or my memory and more to the social, psychological, and parental needs of my children as they navigate life and  one day raise children of their own.